Amat woke in the darkness, her breath fast, her heart pounding. In her dream, Ovi Niit had been kicking in her door, and even when she'd pulled herself up from sleep's dark waters, it took some time for her to feel certain that the booming reports from the dream hadn't been real. Slowly, the panic waned, and she lay back. Above her, the netting glowed like new copper in the light from the night candle and then slowly became brighter and paler as the cool blue light of dawn crept in through the opened windows. The shutters shifted in the sea-scented breeze.
Her desk was piled with papers. Ink bricks hollowed from use stacked one on another at the head of the stairs, waiting to be carried away. The affairs of the house had fallen into near chaos while she was away. She had spent long nights looking over lists and ledgers and telling herself that she cared for them all the way she once had. That House Wilsin and her work for it had not been poisoned.
Amat sighed, sat up, and pushed the netting aside. Her world since her resurrection had been much the same - nightmares until dawn, gray and empty work and messages and meetings until sunset. At one point, seeing the strain on her face at the end of the day, Marchat had offered to send her away for a week to Chaburi-tan once the season was over. The house could cover the expenses, he said. And she let herself imagine that time - away from Saraykeht and the seafront and her desk and the soft quarter - though the fantasy was washed by melancholy. It could never actually happen, but it would have been nice.
Instead, Amat Kyaan rose from her bed, pulled on clean robes, and walked out, leaning on her cane, to the corner stall where a girl from the low towns sold fresh berries wrapped in sweet frybread. It was good enough as a meal to see her through to midday. She ate it as she walked back to her apartments, trying to order her day in her mind, but finding it hard to concentrate on shifting meetings and duties back and forth. Simply leaving her mind blank and empty was so much easier.
Her time since the sad trade and her banishment had felt like being ill. She'd moved through her days without feeling them, unable to concentrate, uninterested in her work. Something had broken in her, and pretending it back to fixed wasn't working. She'd half known it wouldn't, and her mind had made plans for her almost without her knowing it.
The man waiting at her door was wearing robes of yellow and silver - the colors of House Tiyan. He was young - sixteen, perhaps seventeen summers. Liat's age. An apprentice, then, but the apprentice of someone high in House Tiyan. There was only one errand that could mean. Amat shifted her schedule in her mind and popped the last of the berry-soaked frybread into her mouth. The young man, seeing her, fell into a pose of greeting appropriate for an honored elder. Amat responded.
"Kyaan-cha," the boy said, "I come on behalf of Annan Tiyan ..."
"Of course you do," she said, opening her door. "Come inside. You have the listings?"
He hesitated behind her for only a moment. Amat went slowly up the stairs. Her hip was much better since she'd returned to her apartments with her stinging ointment and her own bed. She paused at her basin, washing the red stains from her food off her fingertips before she began handling papers. When she reached her desk, she turned and sat. The boy stood before her. He'd taken the paper from his sleeve - the one she'd sent to his master. She held out her hand, and he gave it to her.
The receipt was signed. Amat smiled and tucked the paper into her own sleeve. It would go with her papers later. The papers she was going to take with her, not the ones for House Wilsin. The box was on the desk under a pile of contracts. Amat shifted it out, into her lap. Dark wood banded by iron, and heavy with jewels and lengths of silver. She handed it to the boy.
"My master ..." the boy began. "That is, Amat Kyaancha, I was wondering if ..."
"Annan wants to know why I'm having him hold the package," she said, "and he wanted you to find out without making it obvious you were asking."
The boy blushed furiously. Amat took a pose that dismissed the issue.
"It's rude of him, but I'd have done the same in his place. You may tell him that I have always followed Imperial form by caching such things with trusted friends. One of the people who had been doing me this favor is leaving the city, though, so it was time to find a new holder. And, of course, if he should ever care to, I would be pleased to return the favor. It's got nothing to do with that poor island girl."
It wasn't true, of course, but it was convenient. This was the fourth such box she'd sent out to men and women in the city to whom she felt she might be able to appeal if circumstances turned against her again. The receipt was only as good as the honor of the people she stowed the boxes with. And there would be a certain amount of theft, she expected - one jewel replaced by another of less value. A few lengths of silver gone despite the locks. It wasn't likely, though, that if she called for them, her boxes would be empty. And in an emergency, that would be very nearly all Amat cared about.
The boy took a pose of acknowledgment and retreated down the stairs. Amat understood what Saraykeht had taught her through Ovi Niit. She wouldn't be caught without her wealth again. That it was a courtesy of the great families of the Empire before it collapsed gave her something like precedent. Annan wouldn't believe that it was unrelated to Maj and the sad trade, but he would understand from her answer that she didn't want him to gossip about it. That would suffice.
For the next hand and a half, she went through the contracts, making notations here and there - one copy for herself, one for the house. So late in the season, there were few changes to be made in the wording. But each contract carried with it two or three letters outlining the completion or modifications of terms and definitions, and these were the sort of things that would sink a trading house if they weren't watched. She went through the motions, checking the translations of the letters in Galtic and the Khaiate, noting discrepancies, or places where a word might have more than one meaning. It was what she'd done for years, and she did it now mechanically and without joy.
When she reached the last one, she checked that the inks were dry, rolled the different documents in tubes tied with cloth ribbons, and packed them into a light satchel - there were too many to fit in her sleeves. She took her cane, then, and walked out into the city, heading north to the Wilsin compound. Away from the soft quarter.
The agents of the utkhaiem were present when she arrived at the wide courtyard of the house. Servants in fine silks lounged at the edge of the fountain, talking among themselves and looking out past the statue of the Galtic Tree to the street. She hesitated when she saw them, fear pricking at her for no reason she could say. She pushed it aside the way she pushed all her feelings aside these recent days, and strode past them toward Marchat Wilsin's meeting room.
Epani Doru, Wilsin-cha's rat-faced, obsequious master of house, sat before the wide wooden doors of the meeting room. When she came close, he rose, taking a pose of welcome just respectful enough to pretend he honored her position.
"I've some issues I'd like Wilsin-cha to see," she said, taking an answering pose.
"He's meeting with men from the court," Epani said, his voice an apology.
Amat glanced at the closed doors and sighed. She took a pose that asked for a duration. Epani answered vaguely, but with a sense that she would be lucky to see her employer's face before sundown.
"It can wait, then," Amat said. "It's about the sad trade? Is that what they're picking at him for?"
"I assume so, Amat-cha," Epani said. "I understand from the servants that the Khai wants the whole thing addressed and forgotten as quickly as possible. There have been requests to lower tariffs."
Amat clucked and shook her head.
"Sour trade, this whole issue," she said. "I'm sorry Wilsin-cha ever got involved in it."
Epani took a pose of agreement and mourning, but Amat thought for a moment there was something in the man's expression. He knew, perhaps. Epani Doru might have been someone who Marchat took into his confidence the way he hadn't taken her. An accomplice to the act. Amat noted her suspicion, tucked it away like a paper into a sleeve, and took a pose of query.
"Liat?"
"In the workrooms, I think," Epani said. "The utkhaiem didn't ask to speak with her."
Amat didn't reply. The workrooms of the compound were a bad place for someone of Liat's rank to be. Preparing packets for the archives, copying documents, checking numbers - all the work done at the low slate tables was better suited for a new clerk, someone who had recently come to the house. Amat walked back to the stifling, still air and the smell of cheap lamp oil.
Liat sat at a table by herself, hunched over. Amat paused, considering the girl. The too-round face had misplaced its youth; Amat could see in that moment what Liat would be when her beauty failed her. A woman, then, and not a lovely one. A dreadful weight of sympathy descended on Amat Kyaan, and she stepped forward.
"Amat-cha," Liat said when she looked up. She took a pose of apology. "I didn't know you had need of me. I would have - "
"I didn't know it either," Amat said. "No fault of yours. Now, what are you working on?"
"Shipments from the Westlands. I was just copying the records for the archive."
Amat considered the pages. Liat's handwriting was clean, legible. Amat remembered days in close heat looking over numbers much like these. She felt her smile tighten.
"Wilsin-cha set you to this?" Amat asked.
"No. No one did. Only I ran out of work, and I wanted to be useful. I'm ... I don't like being idle these days. It just feels ..."
"Don't carry it," Amat said, still pretending to look at the written numbers. "It isn't yours."
Liat took a questioning pose. Amat handed her back the pages.
"It's nothing you did wrong," Amat said.
"You're kind."
"No. Not really. There was nothing you could have done to prevent this, Liat. You were tricked. The girl was tricked. The poet and the Khai."
"Wilsin-cha was tricked," Liat said, adding to the list.
Or trapped, Amat thought, but said nothing. Liat rallied herself to smile and took a pose of gratitude.
"It helps to hear someone say it," the girl said. "Itani does when he's here, but I can't always believe him. But with him going ..."
"Going?"
"North," Liat said, startling as if she'd said more than she'd meant. "He's going north to see his sister. And ... and I already miss him."
"Of course you do. He's your heartmate, after all," Amat said, teasing gently, but the weariness and dread in Liat's gaze deepened. Amat took a deep breath and put a hand on Liat's shoulder.
"Come with me," Amat said. "I have some things I need of you. But someplace cooler, eh?"
Amat led her to a meeting room on the north side of the compound where the windows were in shade and laid the tasks before her. She'd meant to give Liat as little as she could, but seeing her now, she added three or four small things that she'd intended to let rest. Liat needed something now. Work was thin comfort, but it was what she had to offer. Liat listened closely, ferociously.
Amat reluctantly ended her list.
"And before that, I need you to take me to the woman," she said.
Liat froze, then took a pose of acknowledgment.
"I need to speak with her," Amat said, knowing as she said the words precisely how inadequate they were. For a moment, she was tempted to tell the full story, to lighten Liat's burden by whatever measure the truth could manage. But she swallowed it. She put compassion aside for the moment. Along with fear and anger and sorrow.
Liat led her to a private room in the back, not far from Marchat Wilsin's own. Amat knew the place. The delicate inlaid wood of the floor, the Galtic tapestries, the window lattices of carved bone. It was where House Wilsin kept its most honored guests. Amat didn't believe it was where the girl had slept before the crime. That she was here now was a sign of Marchat's pricked conscience.
Maj lay curled on the ledge before the window. Her pale fingers rested on the lattice; the strange dirty gold of her hair spilled down across her shoulders and halfway to the floor. She looked softer. Amat stood behind her and watched the rise and fall of her breath, slow but not so slow as sleep.
"I could stay, if you like," Liat said. "She can ... I think she is better when there are people around who she knows. Familiar faces."
"No," Amat said, and the island girl shifted at the sound of her voice. The pale eyes looked over her with nothing like real interest. "No, Liat-kya, I think I've put enough on you for today. I can manage from here."
Liat took a pose of acceptance and left, closing the door behind her. Amat pulled a chair of woven cane near the island girl and lowered herself into it. Maj watched her. When Amat was settled, the chair creaking under even her slight weight, Maj spoke.
"You hurt her feelings," she said in the sibilant words of Nippu. "You sent her away, didn't you?"
"I did," Amat said. "I came to speak with you. Not her."
"I've told everything I know. I've told it to a hundred people. I won't do it again."
"I haven't come to ask you anything. I've come to tell."
A slow, mocking smile touched the wide, pale lips. The fair eyebrows rose.
"Have you come to tell me how to save my child?"
"No."
Maj shrugged, asking with motion what else could be worth hearing.
"Wilsin-cha is going to arrange your travel back to Nippu," Amat said. "I think it will happen within the week."
Maj nodded. Her eyes softened, and Amat knew she was seeing herself at home, imagining the things that had happened somehow undone. It seemed almost cruel to go on.
"I don't want you to go," Amat said. "I want you to stay here. In Saraykeht."
The pale eyes narrowed, and Maj lifted herself on one elbow, shifting to face Amat directly. Amat could see the distrust in her face and felt she understood it.
"What happened to you goes deeper than it appears," Amat said. "It was an attack on my city and its trade, and not only by the andat and Oshai. It won't be easy to show this for what it was, and if you leave ... if you leave, I don't think I can."
"What can't you do?"
"Prove to the Khai that there were more people involved than he knows of now."
"Are you being paid to do this?"
"No."
"Then why?"
Amat drew in a breath, steadied herself, and met the girl's eyes.
"Because it's the right thing," Amat said. It was the first time she'd said the words aloud, and something in her released with them. Since the day she'd left Ovi Niit, she had been two women - the overseer of House Wilsin and also the woman who knew that she would have to have this conversation. Have this conversation and then follow it with all the actions it implied. She laced her fingers around one knee and smiled, a little sadly, at the relief she felt in being only one woman again. "What happened was wrong. They struck at my city. Mine. And my house was part of it. Because of that, I was part of it. Doing this will gain me nothing, Maj. I will lose a great deal that I hold dear. And I will do it with you or without you."
"It won't bring me back my child."
"No."
"Will it avenge him?"
"Yes. If I succeed."
"What would he do, your Khai? If you won."
"I don't know," Amat said. "Whatever he deems right. He might fine House Wilsin. Or he might burn it. He might exile Wilsin-cha."
"Or kill him?"
"Or kill him. He might turn Seedless against House Wilsin, or the Galtic Council. Or all of Galt. I don't know. But that's not for me to choose. All I can do is ask for his justice, and trust that the Khai will follow the right road afterward."
Maj turned back to the window, away from Amat. The pale fingers touched the latticework, traced the lines of it as if they were the curves of a beloved face. Amat swallowed to loosen the knot in her throat. Outside, a songbird called twice, then paused, and sang again.
"I should go," Amat said.
Maj didn't turn. Amat rose, the chair creaking and groaning. She took her cane.
"When I call for you, will you come?"
The silence was thick. Amat's impulse was to speak again, to make her case. To beg if she needed to, but her training from years of negotiations was to wait. The silence demanded an answer more eloquently than words could. When Maj spoke, her voice was hard.
"I'll come."
SARAYKEHT RECEDED. The wide mouth of the seafront thinned; wharves wide enough to hold ten men standing abreast narrowed to twigs. Otah sat at the back rail of the ship, aware of the swell and drop of the water, the rich scent of the spray, but concentrating upon the city falling away behind him. He could take it all in at once: the palaces of the Khai on the top of the northern slope grayed by distance; the tall, white warehouses with their heavy red and gray tiles near the seafront; the calm, respectable morning face of the soft quarter. Coast fishermen resting atop poles outside the city, lines cast into the surf. They passed east. The river-mouth, wide and muddy, and the cane fields. And then over the course of half a hand, the wind pressing the wide, low ship's sails took them around a bend in the land, and Saraykeht was gone. Otah rested his chin on the oily wood of the railing.
They were all back there - Liat and Maati and Kirath and Tuui and Epani who everyone called the cicada behind his back. The streets he'd carted bales of cotton and cloth and barrels of dye and the teahouses he'd sung and drunk in. The garden where he'd first kissed Liat and been surprised and pleased to find her kissing him back. The firekeeper, least of the utkhaiem, who'd taken copper lengths to let him and his cohort roast pigeons over his kiln. He remembered when he'd first come to it, how foreign and frightening it had been. It seemed a lifetime ago.
And before him was a deeper past. He had never been to the villiage of the Dai-kvo, never seen the libraries or heard the songs that were only ever sung there. It was what he might have been, what he had refused. It was what his father had hoped he would be, perhaps. How he might have returned to Machi one day and seen which of his memories were true. He hadn't known, that day marching away from the school, that the price he'd chosen was so dear.
"I hate this part," an unfamiliar voice said.
Otah looked up. The man standing beside him wore robes of deep green. A beard shot with white belied an unlined, youthful face, and the bright, black eyes seemed amused but not unfriendly.
"What do you mean?" Otah asked.
"The first three or four days on shipboard," the man said. "Before your stomach gets the rhythm of it. I have these drops of sugared tar that are supposed to help, but they never seem to. It doesn't seem to bother you, though, eh?"
"Not particularly," Otah said, adopting one of his charming smiles.
"You're lucky. My name's Orai Vaukheter," the man said. "Courier of House Siyanti bound at present from Chaburitan to Machi - longest damn trip in the cities, and timed to put me on muleback in the north just in time for the first snows. And you? I don't think I've met you, and I'd have guessed I knew everyone."
"Itani Noyga," Otah said, the lie still coming naturally to his lips. "Going to Yalakeht to visit my sister."
"Ah. But from Saraykeht?"
Otah took a pose of acknowledgment.
"Rumor has it's difficult times there. Probably a good time to get out."
"Oh, I'll be going back. It's just to see the new baby, and then I'll be going back to finish my indenture."
"And the girl?"
"What girl?"
"The one you were thinking about just now, before I interrupted you."
Otah laughed and took a pose of query.
"And how are you sure I was thinking about a girl?"
The man leaned against the railing and looked out. His smile was quick enough, but his complexion was a little green.
"There's a certain kind of melancholy a man gets the first time he chooses a ship over a woman. It fades with time. It never passes, but it fades."
"Very poetic," Otah said, and changed the subject. "You're going to Machi?"
"Yes. The winter cities. Funny, too. I'm looking forward to it now, because it's all stone and doesn't bob around like a cork in a bath. When I get there, I'll wish I were back here where my piss won't freeze before it hits the ground. Have you been to the north?"
"No," Otah said. "I've spent most of my life in Saraykeht. What's it like there?"
"Cold," the man said. "Blasted cold. But it's lovely in a stern way. The mines are how they make their trade. The mines and the metalworkers. And the stonemasons who built the place - gods, there's not another city like Machi in the world. The towers ... you've heard about the towers?"
"Heard them mentioned," Otah said.
"I was to the top of one once. One of the great ones. It was high as a mountain. You could see for hundreds of miles. I looked down, and I'll swear it, the birds were flying below me and I felt like a few more bricks and I'd have been able to touch clouds."
The water lapped at the boards of the ship below them, the seagulls cried, but Otah didn't hear them. For a moment, he was atop a tower. To his left, dawn was breaking, rose and gold and pale blue of robin's egg. To his right, the land was still dark. And before him, snow covered mountains - dark stone showing the bones of the land. He smelled something - a perfume or a musk that made him think of women. He couldn't say if the vision was dream or memory or something of both, but a powerful sorrow flowed through him that lingered after the images had gone.
"It sounds beautiful," he said.
"I climbed back down as fast as I could," the man said, and shuddered despite the heat of the day. "That high up, even stone sways."
"I'd like to go there one day."
"You'd fit in. You've a northern face."
"So they tell me," Otah said, smiling again though he felt somber. "I'm not sure, though. I've spent quite a few years in the south. I may belong there now."
"It's hard," his companion said, taking a pose of agreement. "I think it's why I keep travelling even though I'm not really suited to it. Whenever I'm in one place, I remember another. So I'll be in Udun and thinking about a black crab stew they serve in Chaburi-Tan. Or in Saraykeht, thinking of the way the rain falls in Utani. If I could take them all - all the best parts of all the cities - and bring them to a single place, I think that would be paradise. But I can't, so I'm doomed. When the time comes I'm too old to do this, I'll have to settle for one place and I truly believe the thought of never seeing the others again will break me."
For a moment, they were silent. Then the courier's distant expression changed, and he turned to look at Otah carefully.
"You're an interesting one, Itani Noyga. I thought I'd come make light with a young man on what looks like his first journey, and I find myself thinking about my final one. Do you always carry that cloud with you?"
Otah grinned and took a pose of light apology, but hands and smile both wilted under the cool gaze. The canvas chuffed and a man in the back of the low, barge-built ship shouted.
"Yes," he surprised himself by saying. "But very few people seem to notice it."
"SO THE island girl's left," Amat said. "What does it matter? You were about to send her away."
Marchat Wilsin fidgeted, sending little waves across the bath to re-bound against the tiles. Amat sipped her tea and feigned disinterest.
"We were sending her home. It was arranged. Why would she go?" he asked, as much to the water or himself as to her. Amat put her bowl of tea down in the floating tray and took a pose of query that was by its context a sarcasm.
"Let me see, Wilsin-cha. A young girl who has been deceived, used, humiliated. A girl who believed the stories she'd been told about perfect love and a powerful lover and was taken instead to a slaughterhouse for her own blood. Now why wouldn't she want to go back to the people she'd left? I'm sure they wouldn't think her a credulous idiot. No more than the Khai and the utkhaiem do now. There are jokes about her, you know. At the seafront. Laborers and teahouse servants make them up to tell each other. Did you want to hear some?"
"No," Marchat said and slapped the water. "No, I don't. I don't want it to happen, and if it's going to, I don't want to know about it."
"Shame, Marchat. She left from shame."
"I don't see why she should feel ashamed," he said, a defensiveness in his voice. A defense of himself and, heart-breakingly, of Maj. "She didn't do anything wrong."
Amat released her pose and let her hands slip back under the water. Wilsin-cha's lips worked silently, as if he were in conversation with himself and halfway moved to speaking. Amat waited.
The night before, she had taken Maj out to one of the low towns - a fishing village west of the city. A safe house outside the city would do, Amat thought, until a more suitable arrangement could be made. A week, she hoped, but perhaps more. In the last days, her plans had begun to fall away from House Wilsin's. It wouldn't be long before she and her employer, her old friend, parted company. It was worse, sitting there with him in the bathhouse he'd used for years, because he didn't know. House Wilsin had taken her from a life on knife-edge, and he - Marchat-cha - had chosen her from among the clerks and functionaries. He had promoted her through the ranks. And now they sat as they had for years, but it was nearing the last time.
Despite herself, Amat leaned forward and put her palm on his shoulder. He looked up and forced a smile.
"It's over," he said. "At least it's over."
It was something he'd said often in the last days, repeating it as if saying the words again would make them true. So perhaps some part of him did know that it was far from finished. He took her hand and, to her surprise, kissed it. His whiskers scratched her water-softened skin. Gently and despite him, she pulled away. He was blushing. Gods, the poor man was blushing. It made her want to weep, want to leave, want to shout at him until her echoing fury cracked the tiles. After all you've done, how dare you make me feel sympathy for you?
"Wilsin-cha," she said. "The shipping schedule."
"Yes," he said. "Of course. The schedule."
Together, they went through the trivial issues of the day. A small fire in one of the weaver's warehouses meant that they would be three thousand feet of thread short for the ship to Bakta. It was significant enough to warrant holding the ship, but they didn't dare keep it too long - the season was turning. And then there was the issue of a persistent mildew in one of House Wilsin's warehouses that had spoiled two bolts of silk, and had to be addressed before they dared to use the space again.
Amat laid out the options, made her suggestions, answered Wilsin-cha's questions, and accepted his decisions. In the main part of the bathhouse, a man broke out in song, his voice joined - a little off-key - by two more. The warm breeze coming through the cedar trellis at the windows moved the surface of the water. Painful as it was, Amat felt herself grabbing at the details - the pinkness of Marchat's pale skin, the thin crack in the side of the lacquer tray, the just-bitter taste of overbrewed tea. Like a squirrel, she thought, gathering nuts for the winter.
"Amat," he said, when they were through and she started to rise. The hardness in his voice caught her, and she lowered herself back into the water. "There's something ... You and I, we've worked together for more years than I like to remember. You've always been ... always been very professional. But I've felt that along with that, we've been friends. I know that I have held you in the highest regard. Gods, that sounds wrong. Highest regard? Gods. I'm doing this badly."
He raised his hands from the water, fingertips wrinkled as raisins, and motioned vaguely. His face was tight and flushed. Amat frowned, confused, and then the realization washed over her like nausea. He was about to declare his love.
She put her head down, pressing a palm to her forehead. She couldn't look up. Laughter that had as much to do with horror as mirth shook her gently. Of all the things she'd faced, of all the evils she'd steeled herself to walk through, this one had taken her blind. Marchat Wilsin thought he loved her. It was why he'd stood up to Oshai to save her. It was why she was alive. It was ridiculous.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have ... Forget that. I didn't ... I sound like a half-wit schoolboy. Here's the thing, Amat. I didn't mean to be involved with this. These last days, I've been feeling a certain distance from you. And I'm afraid that you and I might have ... lost something between us. Something that ..."
It had to stop. She had to stop it.
"Wilsin-cha," she said, and forced herself into a formal pose of respect appropriate to a superior in business. "I think perhaps it is too soon. The ... the wounds are too fresh. Perhaps we might postpone this conversation."
He took a pose of agreement that seemed to carry a relief almost as deep as her own. She shifted to a pose of leave-taking, which he returned. She didn't meet his gaze as she left. In the dressing room, she pulled on her robes, washed her face, and leaned against the great granite basin, her hands clenched white on its rim, until her mind had stilled. With a long, deep, slow breath, she composed herself, then took up her cane and walked out into the streets, as if the world were not a broken place, and her path through it was not twisted.
She strode to the compound, her leg and hip hardly bothering her. She delivered the orders she had to give, made the arrangements she had discussed with Wilsin-cha. Liat, thankfully, was elsewhere. Amat's day was difficult enough without adding the burden of Liat's guilt and pain. And, of course, there was the decision of whether to take the girl with her when Amat left her old life behind.
When Amat had written the last entry in the house logs, she cleaned the nib on its cloth, laid the paper over the half-used inkblock, and walked south, toward the seafront. And not toward her apartments. She passed by the stalls and the ships, the watersellers and firekeepers and carts that sold strips of pork marinated in ginger and cumin. When she reached the wide mouth of the Nantan, she paused, considering the bronze form of the last emperor gazing out over the sea. His face was calm and, she thought, sorrowful. Shian Sho had watched the Empire fall, watched the devastation of war between high counselors who could wield poets and andat. How sad, she thought, to have had so much and been powerless to save it. For the first time in her life, she felt something more than awe or historical curiosity or familiarity with the image of the man eight generations dead. She walked to the base of the statue, reached out and rested her hand on the sun-hot metal of his foot almost painful to touch. When she turned away, her sorrow was not less, but it was accompanied by a strange lifting of her heart. A kinship, perhaps, with those who had struggled before her to save the cities they held dear. She walked toward the river, and the worst parts of the city. Her city. Hers.
The teahouse was rough - its shutters needed painting, the plaster of its walls was scored with the work of vandals cheaply repaired - but not decrepit. Its faults spoke of poverty, not abandonment. A man with the deep blue eyes and red hair of the Westlands leaned out of a window, trying not to seem to stare at her. Amat raised an eyebrow and walked through the blue-painted door and into the murk of the main room.
The smell of roast lamb and Westlands beer and cheap tobacco washed over her. The stone floor was smooth and clean, and the few men and women sitting at tables seemed to take little notice of her. The dogs under the tables shifted toward her and then away, equally incurious. Amat looked around with an expression that she hoped would be read as confidence and impatience. A dark-haired girl came to her before long, wiping her hands on her robe as she came. She took a pose of greeting which Amat returned.
"We have tables here," the girl said. "Or perhaps you would care for a room in the back? We have a good view of the river, if ..."
"I'm here to see a man named Torish Wite," Amat said. "I was told that he would expect me."
The girl fell into a pose of understanding without surprise or hesitation, turned, and led Amat back through a short corridor to an open door. Amat took a pose of thanks, and stepped through.
He was a big man, thick hair the color of honey, a rough scar on his chin. He didn't rise as she came in, only watched her with a distant amusement. Amat took a pose appropriate to opening a negotiation.
"No," the man said in the language of the Westlands. "If you want to talk to me, you can use words."
Amat dropped her hands and sat. Torish Wite leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. The knife he wore at his belt was as long as Amat's forearm. She felt fear tighten her throat. This man was strong, brutal, prone to violence. That was, after all, why she was here.
"I understand you have men for hire," she said.
"Truth," he agreed.
"I want a dozen of them."
"For what?"
"I can't tell you that yet."
"Then you can't have 'em."
"I'm prepared to pay - "
"I don't care what you're prepared to pay. They're my men, and I'm not sending them out unless I know what I'm sending them into. You can't say, then you can't have them."
He looked away, already bored. Amat shook her head, pushing away her emotions. This was the time to think, not feel. The man was a businessman, even if what he traded in was violence. He had nothing to gain by building a reputation of spilling his client's secrets.
"I am about to break with my house," she said. After holding her intentions in silence for so long, it was strange to hear the words spoken. "I am going to be taking up a project that will put me in opposition to my previous employer. If I'm to succeed in it, I will have to secure a large and steady income."
Torish Wite shifted forward, his arms resting on his knees. He was considering her now. He was curious. She had him.
"And how are you going to arrange that?" he asked.
"There is a man named Ovi Niit. He runs a comfort house in the soft quarter. I mean to take it from him."